Also author of five documentaries. Contributor to Chicago Reader, Artforum, In These Times, Soho Weekly News, and Village Voice.

SIDELIGHTS:

Noël Carroll's research and writing takes in the fields of social and cultural theory, aesthetic theory, and various aspects of philosophy, including the philosophy of history, of the visual arts, of the emotions, and of ethics. He has also written on the history of early modern philosophy, and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to work on exploring the relationship between dance and philosophy. Film has been a particular interest of his since his undergraduate years at Hofstra University, where he began writing about theater and film for the university's newspaper. Carroll also was cofounder of a film society while at Hofstra. In an interview with Ray Privett and James Kreul for the Sense of Cinema, Carroll remembered that while in college he came to believe that "film and philosophy went together like a ham and cheese sandwich. But increasingly it seemed to me that if you wanted to pay attention to film, you would have to develop frameworks for discussing film, and though those might have something to do with philosophy, you shouldn't just assume a priori that they would." Carroll went on to enroll in the graduate cinema studies program at New York University.

Carroll had enjoyed horror films since his adolescence, and in his book The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, he analyzes horror films and why they appeal to their audiences. "It struck me that certain genres, such as suspense, mystery, comedy, melodrama, and horror, are actually identified by their relation to certain emotions," he said in his Sense of Cinema interview. "As a case study, I went about analyzing horror. I began by looking at what kind of horror we expect from horror fiction…. I argued that horror was made up of two emotions we are already familiar with, fear and disgust. So I crafted my theory of the nature of horror by saying that horror is defined in terms of its elicitation of fear and disgust." In horror films, Carroll continued, "monsters are defined as things not acknowledged to exist by scientific lights. So the emotion of horror is elicited by beings not acknowledged to exist by science that are both harmful and impure." His book goes on to explore subjects such as why people would want to expose themselves to horrifying imagery and plots. "You end with a fascinating comparison between postmodernism and the contemporary horror cycle," the author concluded. He said that he had hoped The Philosophy of Horror would find a sizable audience and that he "would be able to retire on it." It did not achieve success at that level, but the book gathered something of a cult following and continues to sell well many years after its publication.

Many of Carroll's other books have also been well received. Reviewing Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction for Aesthetics, Matthew Kieran called Carroll's book "an excellent work, ideal for use as a set text for basic undergraduate courses in analytic aesthetics. The writing is admirably clear, the nature and structure of different kinds of philosophical arguments are succinctly explained and exemplified and, as one has come to expect from Carroll, a wide-ranging knowledge of art forms and history is used to good effect in the illustration of points made."

Carroll's Engaging the Moving Image is a collection of eighteen of his previously published essays on film and is in some ways a follow-up to his earlier book, Theorizing the Moving Image. In this collection, the author is "wide-ranging, theorizing about medium specificity, the nature of documentary, film and emotion, film evaluation, and naturalistic accounts of mainstream film form," reported Carl Plantinga in a review for College Literature.

Times Higher Education Supplement, April 3, 1998, Arthur Smith, review of A Philosophy of Mass Art, p. 27; May 26, 2006, John Mullarkey, "Dinner-Party Guests Trapped in the Matrix," review of Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures.

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